Elon Musk says Twitter will launch a new “higher price” blue subscription that doesn’t show ads on the platform. The current $7.99 per month subscription to Twitter Blue promises 50 percent fewer ads compared to “unverified people,” though this feature hasn’t been rolled out yet.
We don’t yet know how much the ad-free tier will cost or when it might launch, and Twitter no longer has a communications team to contact. The existing Blue subscription comes with perks like a blue “verified” checkmark, the ability to undo tweets, a way to upload longer 1080p videos, a reading mode for threads, and prioritized sorting in conversations.
This comes just a few days after Twitter quietly banned third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific. On Thursday, the company updated its developer agreement to note that developers may not use the Twitter API to “create or attempt to create a substitute or similar product or service for Twitter applications.”
As my colleague Mitchell Clark points out, while some developers pay to access the Twitter API, Twitter does not serve ads through it, preventing the company from earning ad revenue. Also, people using third-party apps may not see the need to purchase a Twitter Blue subscription, as some of them already offer an enhanced (and sometimes ad-free) Twitter experience.
